James Cameron Not Interested in Buying the Terminator Rights
Posted 01.08.10 by Ryan
With the rights to the Terminator franchise still up for sale, there's one person who has no interest in buying them: James Cameron, the man who created the franchise back in 1984 with The Terminator and followed it with Terminator 2: Judgement Day in 1991. In an interview with At the Movies, Cameron said that buying the rights wouldn't be worth the money.
People ask me why I didn't want to get involved in trying to re-capture the rights to Terminator. For one, who wants to spend $50 million on the rights, and then another $25 million or $30 million on actors? By the time you get to it, how much do you actually have to make the movie? That's robbing the audience.
Ironically, this comes from the director who spent $300 million dollars making Avatar, but Cameron says that money was used properly.
We put every dollar up there on the screen in Avatar — [the money]
is not squandered on star salaries. That's a pretty damn good deal when the cost of a ticket doesn't change.
Hard to disagree with a guy who has made two movies that have earned a billion dollars in box-office receipts.